
CHAD COOMBS
I am a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, collage, and painting. My practice examines identity, perception, and the systems that shape human behavior, often focusing on the tension between internal experience and external influence. My work is shaped by process and material. Using analog photography, hand-constructed imagery, direct mark-making, distortion, fragmentation, and recontextualization, I treat each medium as an active participant rather than a neutral tool.
Much of my work centers on portraiture, not as representation, but as a site of construction. Figures are often altered, layered, or destabilized, reflecting the competing forces that shape identity, including social systems, cultural expectations, and collective perception. Informed by lived experience, including autism, my practice uses observation and inquiry to engage with structure, behavior, and contradiction. Through this approach, I construct images that invite viewers to question not only what they are seeing, but how and why they see it that way.













